A large, searchable, web-based database of aphasic performance on picture naming and other tests of cognitive function

Abstract

Many research questions in aphasia can only be answered through access to substantial numbers of patients and to their responses on individual test items. Since such data are often unavailable to individual researchers and institutions, we have developed and made available the Moss Aphasia Psycholinguistics Project Database: a large, searchable, web-based database of patient performance on psycholinguistic and neuropsychological tests. The database contains data from over 240 patients covering a wide range of aphasia subtypes and severity, some of whom were tested multiple times. The core of the archive consists of a detailed record of individual-trial performance on the Philadelphia (picture) Naming Test. The database also contains basic demographic information about the patients and patients' overall performance on neuropsychological assessments as well as tests of speech perception, semantics, short-term memory, and sentence comprehension. The database is available at http://www.mappd.org/.

Keywords:

• Aphasia
• Database
• Picture naming
• Language

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for a long-running grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH: RO1DC000191) to M.F.S., which supported data collection and the development of the database. Database development was also assisted by support from the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute. The authors owe a special debt of gratitude to all of the patients who completed these tests (with invariable patience and good cheer), the speech-language pathologists who generously took the time to refer these individuals to us, and the research assistants who conducted most of the testing and coding of the results.